“We better get going,” Uncle Vic declared. He was moving a little better, but his face still twinged with occasional pain.
“Grab my bag and those gems, then help me fix the dragon statue.”
Merry thought for a brief second that Gully was going to carry Uncle Vic’s bag for them; she should have known better. He snagged another travel cake, threw the gems into the bag, and then tossed the satchel to her with a grin as if he was helping.
“Gee, thanks,” she muttered.
Uncle Vic had bent with a painful grimace to pick up Inazuma.
“Don’t!” Merry warned.
He gave her a confused look as his hand tried to grasp the hilt. With a twitching jerk, he released it, sat down hard on his rear, and scooted a little away from the sword.
“What the…”
Gully swooped in and grabbed Inazuma before Uncle Vic could even fully raise his hand to protest. Then, in one smooth motion, he bowed to them with an exaggerated sword-flourish like they had seen Knights of the Rose do on tourney day.
“Only the chosen may grasp the Draconic Sword of Destiny!” Gully intoned in a boyish attempt at deep, dramatic tones. He then shifted into one of his improbable mock battle-stances, only this time, instead of a pretend stick-sword, he held a true blade of power.
Merry just sighed.
“Don’t ask me,” Inazuma said resignedly, “I don’t understand him either.”
“Well, huh!” was all Uncle Vic said while struggling back to his feet with a grimace.
Merry quickly grabbed his good arm again and helped him up. They then all turned and faced the statue of Alaric.
“Thank you, oh Lord of Storms, for protecting my family,” Uncle Vic said solemnly, “and I humbly beseech you to continue your protection until they are safely home again.”
They stood in silence a moment until a crack of lightning jumped to Inazuma’s naked blade.
“Sorry,” the voice of Inazuma sounded almost sheepish, “I hate to interrupt whatever rituals you humans use to channel divine spirits. I thought it best to make sure I have a full charge. And we really should go.”
“Yes!” Gully exclaimed, “let’s go slay that fire-dragon with my lightning sword and rescue Pa and Uncle Wex!”
“I fear you overestimate my power, dear boy,” Inazuma stated. “Before the might of a dragon like Theriaxus, my best bolt would be but an annoying scratch, and you all would be charred crisps in an instant. Even if Ruka was here, it is unlikely we could face a dragon of that power.”
“I wonder where she…” Merry began but was interrupted.
“Wait! Ruka! Rukastanna Greymantle?” Uncle Vic cried, grabbing Merry’s shoulder with his good hand and shaking her.
“Err, yeah,” she stammered out. Merry was pretty sure that was what the dragon-girl said her name was.
“Goes around as a little girl,” he held his hand up a little shorter than Merry, then spread his arms wide, “but with a huge attitude?”.
Now that she thought about it, Merry realized that Ruka, in girl-form, was shorter than her. Although her presence made her seem bigger when she was in the room.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. She was heading back to the cove to rescue Pa and Uncle Wex,” Merry said tentatively.
“Then they’ll be fine,” Uncle Vic declared with confidence. “We better fix that statue and hike back to town. Knowing Ruka, they’ll all be waiting long before us.”
“How…” Merry’s thoughts stumbled a little bit, “how do you know a dragon?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you later,” Uncle Vic replied, “but right now I can tell you that everything will be fine.”
“You better tell me!” Merry declared, “and you better be right, too!”
“Trust me,” Uncle Vic just smiled and led them over to fix the dragon statue.
5
Princess of Misfortune
The old road was rough and overgrown, but it would have been better than trekking straight through the woods like they were. Uncle Vic had insisted that they stay under tree cover, which made perfect sense with the possibility of dragons hunting in the sky. So, they traveled cautiously through the woods, keeping the old road to one side as a guide.
He seemed to be moving well, if a little gingerly, using his staff more than usual. Uncle Vic was the kind who would bemoan every little cut or sniffle but never admit to feeling pain if he was truly hurt. And that’s what worried Merry.
He had crept off to scout the cove as soon as they emerged from the ruins. It was a quietly heated argument, but he convinced Merry by demonstrating that even injured, he could move with far more stealth than they could match. So, she promised to sit on Gully if necessary, to keep him in their hiding spot a good distance from the dragon hall.
He put up a good front, skulking off and vanishing silently into the brush. But the pallor of his face on returning was as much from the exertion to his injured side as from what he saw.
There were still dragons about the cove area, and no sign, one way or the other, of Pa or Uncle Wex. Remembering the lengths that the dragon-girl Ruka had gone through to save them, and Uncle Vic’s strange confidence, Merry held out some small hope that they were alright, too.
Then they saw the airship.
It was a thing out of Merry’s favorite stories. A huge, wooden vessel of graceful curves and fanciful superstructure, floating in the air. The ship’s rigging was composed of lines of coppery metal cables with silver and black sails set more to catch sunlight than breeze. Immense bands of glowing energy coursed laterally from the ship like great ring-shaped wings, a beautiful and most obvious part of the powerful magic that allowed it to soar the skies.
Gully wanted to run into the open and signal the ship, grabbing her hand eagerly; but Uncle Vic held them both back.
“What are they doing here?” he hissed, pulling the two of them back under the tree line as urgently as he could with his injured shoulder.
“Who?” Gully asked.
“See that gilded dragon on the flag? That’s the symbol of the royal house of Lanfor, and the dragon is rampant. That could only mean that the princess is on board.”
Merry had read a great deal about Lanfor. Tales of the Magical Kingdom was such a heavy tome that when she was younger, old Yoseff, the lorekeeper for the Baroness’ Library, had to lug it over to a reading table for her.
Village children could not take books from the hall, of course, so she spent whatever spare moments she could find amidst her many chores in that dusty hall of beloved tomes. And that book on Lanfor was one of her favorites. Most of the stories were about the royal family; they all seemed to live such glorious, exciting, or tragic lives. Usually all three.
Since the death of King Flandril Farbican the First, over three hundred years ago, there has always been a queen of Lanfor—the same queen—Queen Amerelis. She was often called the Eternal Queen, or the Usurper Queen, depending on whether you were a loyalist or a freedom fighter.
The treachery of Flandril’s first wife, Mariva the Apostate, and oldest son, Welbarvik, during the War of Embers, led to Flandril’s eventual death. On his deathbed, he had his most loyal and powerful lords, his second wife, Amerelis, and his war companion and mount, the golden sun dragon, Lirasanna, take sacred vows.
Flandril's dying wish was that his evil son not take the throne and that Amerelis rule as queen until one of his line who was worthy could be found. He entrusted Lirasanna to weigh the worth of the potential heir. They all took sacred oaths to uphold his wish.
The book of tales was a collection of stories on the trials, battles, and travails of Flandril’s decedents, written by those both loyal to the queen and those not. And although the depiction of the queen was starkly different depending on the author, it was clear to Merry that the royal family was at best terribly conflicted, and at worst a bunch of backstabbing scoundrels.
If this was a royal airship, then it could only belong to Princess Anyabarithia, the only known survivor o
f the purge called the War of the Eternal Queen. It was a brutal conflict of familial genocide where the revolutionaries believed that if they could just kill off all the descendants of Flandril, the queen and her dragon would have to give up their vows and abdicate.
The book was too old to have stories of this latest princess, but it had several about the adventures of her mother, Shandillis. Shandi was depicted as a good person, and in the stories, one of her dearest friends, Ves, turned out to be a storm dragon. Merry now had firsthand experience that that particular story might be true. Storm dragons could both be friendly, and disguise themselves as people.
“I bet they’re hunting dragons,” Gully declared. “We could help them.”
“I don’t know,” Vic replied, but his tone indicated that he did know and would brook no argument. “I’ve heard stories about that one.”
“Stories that you would be well-advised to believe.” Inazuma’s voice sounded muffled from within the tight bundle of Vic’s heavy cloak that Gully was carrying. “My Lady Ruka and I were summoned to help rescue her sister from princess Anya’s diabolical clutches. Sadly, it was a classic case of a beautiful dragon kidnapped by an evil princess, just like in the old tales.”
Merry didn’t know what stories the ancient sword was talking about; most of the tales she had read were the opposite. She supposed that maybe dragon stories had a different perspective. And she made a mental note to ask Inazuma to recite some when they had a break in which he could be unbound from the cloak.
It took the sword himself to convince Gully to keep him wrapped. They had no sheath with them, and the slightest glint of sunlight off the polished bronze of his blade could give away their location to airborne dragons.
Merry had suggested that she could carry the unwieldy bundle of the sword for him once it was bundled, and she offered Gully his club back. He declined, uncharacteristically solemn, saying the sword was his burden to carry, and the ‘magic stick’ was hers. She laughed at that, assuring him it was just a piece of driftwood. Yet she still carried it around with her.
“What kind of stories?” Gully asked the sword.
“Not now,” Uncle Vic stated, “and regardless, it’s best if we don’t get noticed by ones of such lofty station. It never ends well.”
Merry supposed he was right. She was used to the gentle and nurturing care that the Lady Gracelynn displayed to all her subjects—or even the late Baron Gryswold—whose stern, ironclad rules applied to himself and his officers as equally as his subjects.
But she knew from her reading that was not the norm for nobility, let alone royalty. And this was royalty from another country. Her family would be less than nothing to the likes of them. The best they could hope for was to be ignored, and the worst was not worth thinking about. Some of the stories of the royal family implied things better off not imagined.
The ship passed close overhead, and although they couldn’t see it through the leaves at that angle, they could hear the hum of the energy bands, and Merry was suddenly certain she could feel it, too. Not a vibration per se, but she could feel the energy of the great ship somehow, and it wasn’t right. She envisioned it as a huge beast that she knew had become ill.
“I think they’re in some kind of trouble,” Merry said quietly to herself.
“One of their emitter crystals is missing, and some of the others are a half-turn out of alignment,” a woman’s voice spoke from the shadows of a tree limb above them, where she casually sat.
All three of them gaped and stared at the young woman. They had not seen her when they crept from the sun into the dense shade of these branches.
“This is a good tree to hide under if you don’t want to be seen from above,” the woman stated while climbing nimbly down from one of the wide branches. “I guess we are fellow travelers who wish to avoid any ‘royal’ pains.”
Upon reaching the ground, the woman faced the three of them with a smile. She wore a knee-length dress of red and black with pale, faintly shimmering, yellow stars. Her ample bosom was wrapped in black, but her midriff was bare. The scandalous outfit looked like something a Rover might wear. During the recent birthday extravaganza for the Baron’s daughter, a large group of those travelling entertainers had visited their village. They had set up a small street of wagons, tents, and stands. And this woman looked familiar to Merry like she had seen her at one of those tents.
“The fortune-teller!” Merry gasped.
“Misfortune teller is more like it,” Uncle Vic groaned.
There was the whisk of steel death through the air, followed by a clash and groan of old metal as the blade stopped inches from Wexel’s throat and hung there unmoving. Worn and pitted by age and spotted with what looked like dried blood, it would have taken his head clean off if it had struck. Off-balance and shocked, he fell back on his rear, looking up at near-death.
The small lizard-creature that Ruka called Ratnosk held a short metal rod jammed into some mechanism in the floor. The creature strained against it for a few moments more, then released it. The blade continued its arc into the wall with a snick that sounded sinister to Wexel.
Ratnosk threw himself prone in front of Ruka, his high-pitched jabbering language shriller and more panicked than normal. He went on for a painful half-minute before Ruka’s raised hand and sharp word silenced him. The strange creature stopped immediately and just lay there like a limp rag doll.
She turned to Wexel and simply said, “He says he’s sorry.”
Even after seeing the transformation, it was still hard to believe this skinny young girl was a storm dragon. That was until you saw her eyes. It could have been his imagination, but Wexel definitely felt there was the hint of a distant tempest there.
“He also says that is the last of them,” Ruka looked accusingly at Ratnosk as she said it, then barked a few words in the guttural language of dragons. The creature supplicated itself even more vigorously, squeaking assent.
“Better be,” he heard her mutter to herself.
“Wait here,” she instructed Wexel and Hevik, “We’ll do this the dragon way.” Then she turned and stomped down the rest of the deadly corridor, alternating one side then the other, and slapping the walls with her palms.
Ratnosk watched in obvious terror from where he crouched on the floor. And Wexel couldn’t help also cringing in anticipation of another of those cruel blades snapping forth to split her slender young form in twain.
But he knew better, he knew those burns on her back were from a conflagration that would have fried a normal person to ash. If this form of hers shared her wounds, then maybe it also shared her draconic durability regardless of her appearance. At least she seemed to believe that.
Hevik only watched numbly from a few steps behind, holding the glowing piece of driftwood that Ruka had given them for light. He still seemed to be in shock from the day’s events. Do you think we died at that cove and are just doomed to wander in purgatory? Hevik had asked. He had nodded to Wexel’s denial of that possibility but hadn’t seemed convinced.
If this was purgatory, they certainly had a strange guide. And it had been an interminably long trip here through tight, dark, and winding tunnels. It was enough to sap the spirit of any man.
Ruka reached the end of the corridor without any more blades springing forth. She turned, nodding with a slight smile at Ratnosk.
“I guess he was right,” she said brightly, “there were no more tr— Ahh!”
And with that, the floor opened up and the dragon girl plummeted from sight.
When the grand airship of the princess of Lanfor finally appeared on the horizon, Theria waited on the beach, once again herself—beautiful, powerful, and crimson-scaled.
She could hardly wait to see Scorch. There were so many new stories to tell him—of battles with devious and dangerous storm dragons, antics of stupid ice dragons, and the power of a heart of fire that can prevail against anything. But there were also other stories she now had to tell.
The basket w
as left on the beach, most of the honey rolls and jam still packed carefully in water-resistant cloth. Theria decided she really didn’t like sweets. All the fish cakes were gone; they were surprisingly good.
The book was back at the end of the breakwater, still hidden in the little crevice, but higher, easier to reach, and safer from the danger of the tide.
She secretly placed her magical mark upon the book. It was an old fire dragon spell, used to track especially prized items from ones’ hoard, and the bane of many a would-be thief. With it, Theria was sure she could locate that book again, and perhaps, if she still lived, the girl who owned it. Her name, ‘Meriwynn Fichgotz,’ was boldly written on the first page. And the scent on the book clearly marked her as the same girl with the desperate bravery and fervent eyes.
There had been at least four humans in this cove who had simply vanished; the storm dragons had obviously taken them. And she doubted it was to eat them—they were notoriously fond of the invasive pests. After all, they were the dragonkin who had unfortunately invited the scourge of mankind in to plague this world.
She told herself the marked book was all part of a clever ruse to capture the storm dragons or their allies on land. But maybe, just maybe, some secret part of her wanted more stories.
Long before the shadow of the airship fell across the cove, Theria could feel the difference was more than just a weakening of the dragon shard. At this range, she could see the slight flickering of the elemental bands of energy that wrapped the flying ship. Something had happened—not just to the shard—but to the whole ship. The spirit of the ship itself was wrong, she could feel it in her spines.
As the airship slowed to a less-than-graceful descent over the cove, both Irovnia and Berikarth alighted on the deck at the princess’ first call. Perhaps they were fearful of punishment for failure. Such trivial things as the pain of punishment were nothing to a true heart of fire—and fear was nonexistent.
The ship settled into the water outside the cove. Landing like that was not something they did often, and certainly not something they would do when in pursuit of prey. The ship, and therefore the princess, was in some discomfort, a fact that Theria felt like savoring for a brief time.
Tales From Thac Page 35